Using the example of rock climber Alex Honnold, the scientific journal Nautilus tells what is wrong with extreme athletes from the point of view of neurobiology. Maybe they really do not have all the houses? But an ordinary person is also able to learn how to tame fear, and there are specific scientific explanations and recipes for this. The main thing is not to overdo it: overcoming yourself is also addictive.
Alex Honnold has spawned a new word. The English verb to honnold (roughly: "honnoldit") means "to stand at a height with your back to the sheer stone wall and look into the abyss." Into the abyss, in the truest sense of the word.
This neologism was inspired by the photographs of Honnold on the 550-meter-high Praise Ledge in Yosemite National Park. Then Honnold managed to sneak sideways along a narrow ledge: heels against the wall, toes over the precipice. In 2008, he became the first to conquer the Half Dome granite dome without insurance. If he lost his balance, he would have been waiting for a long ten-second flight to death. Imagine. Time. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
Honnold is the greatest lone climber in history. He climbs the mountains light, without any equipment. Any drop over 15 meters is likely to be fatal. This means that, going on his epic exploits, he risks his life for twelve or more hours each time. On the most difficult routes, his fingers barely touch the rock surface, even weaker than your fingers - the smartphone screen, and his toes rest against a strip of stone no wider than a pack of chewing gum. Even from one video of Honnold's climbing, it's no surprise to experience dizziness, palpitations and nausea. Many people turn away altogether and simply cannot bring themselves to look. Even Honnold himself admitted that his palms sweat when he looks at himself in the tape.
All these merits have earned Honnold the fame of the greatest climber. His portraits have graced the covers of National Geographic and 60 Minutes, he has appeared in ads for Citibank and BMW, as well as in a whole bunch of viral videos. Even though he himself admits that the feeling of fear is familiar to him (for example, the episode on the ledge, Thank God, he described as "incredibly dumb"), his name has become a symbol of fearlessness.
There is no end to idle speculation that he allegedly does not have all the houses. In 2014, Honnold gave a speech at the Explorers' Hall at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington. The audience gathered to listen to the climber photographer Jimmy Chin and the seasoned traveler Mark Sinnott, but Honnold was the star of the program.
And the most thunderous applause was thwarted by Sinnott's story, how one day he and his team sailed on a sailing boat to Oman to reach the Musandam Peninsula, with a skeleton jutting out into the northern part of the Persian Gulf. Having reached a remote village, they went ashore to chat with the locals. “All of a sudden they started screaming and pointing at the cliff. We are like: “What happened?” But to myself I thought: I guess I guess”.
Promotional video:
A photo flashed on the screen and the audience gasped. Honnold, an ordinary guy in a gray sweatshirt with a hood and camouflage pants - he is standing nearby, on the same stage - climbs a tiny figure on a huge, white as bone, mountain towering above the village. Alone and no insurance. “The stone there was not so hot, it can be better,” he later admitted. “The villagers had already decided that Alex was something like a magician or a sorcerer,” summed up Sinnott.
At the end of the presentation, the travelers sat down to sign autographs. People lined up in three lines. In one stood a neurologist - she was going to exchange a word or two with Sinnott about the so-called center of fear that everyone has in their heads. When she waited, she bent down confidentially, nodded at Honnold and said: "But the guy's amygdala in his brain doesn’t bother."
Long ago Honnold confessed that he was afraid - and these are his own words, not mine - to see doctors so that they would not climb into his head and soul. “I always preferred not to dig into it,” he said, “Like, since it’s not broken, then there’s nothing to fix. What is there to understand at all? But now it seems to me that I have grown up to that”.
Popular with climbers El Capitan mountain peak in Yosemite, California.
And so on a March 2016 morning, he sprawled out inside a huge white pipe at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, like a sausage in a hot dog. This machine is an MRI scanner, essentially a giant magnet. He tracks the activity of different parts of the brain by the strength of the blood flow.
A few months earlier, I had already suggested Honnold to take a closer look at his brain, which causes both admiration and numerous evil jokes. "How can I put it, I feel like a completely normal person," he said, "I will be curious to know what science has to say."
Why does he need it?
The volunteer cognitive neuroscientist who volunteered to scan Honnold is named Jane Joseph. In 2005, she pioneered research into the brains of thrill seekers who are attracted to high-risk activities. The pursuit of thrill has long been of interest to psychologists: often this passion gets out of control, leading to alcohol and drug addiction, sex addiction and gambling addiction. In Honnold, Jane saw the type even more remarkable: the super-keen sensation lover who gravitates towards sensations beyond danger, but does not lose his composure, controlling both mind and body. Honnold's abilities simply amazed her. She began to watch a video of him climbing up without belay, but could not - she has the most usual danger threshold.
“It’s interesting to know what’s inside,” she looks forward to. We are sitting in the control room behind a tinted window. Scanning starts. "Now let's see how his amygdala feels: does he really have no fear."
The amygdala (also known as the amygdala or amygdala) is often referred to as the center of fear, but rather serves as a center for responding to threats and deciphering alarms. The amygdala receives information directly from the senses, thanks to which we automatically take a step back from the edge of the abyss, without thinking for a split second. It also triggers a number of painfully familiar anxiety reactions: palpitations, sweaty palms, tunnel vision, loss of appetite. Meanwhile, the amygdala only sends data "upward" for more accurate processing in the cerebral cortex, and even there they turn into a conscious emotion - fear.
The initial scan image is displayed on the screen of assistant James Pearl. “Can you bring your tonsil closer? We need to know for sure,”asks Joseph. The medical literature describes rare cases of congenital pathologies, for example, Urbach-Wite disease, which causes the destruction of the amygdala. Although such patients do not feel fear, they have a number of other symptoms - for example, complete indifference to personal space. One such patient not only calmly stood nose to nose with others, but also managed to maintain eye contact.
Pearl flips through symmetrical layers, reminiscent of the bizarre topography of the Rorschach test. Suddenly a pair of almond-shaped nodules emerge from the gray bog. "There is!" - Joseph rejoices, and Pearl laughs. Whatever explains Honnold's fearlessness, it is clearly not the absence of an amygdala. At first glance, the organ appears to be perfectly healthy, says Joseph.
Honnold, who is lying in a pipe, is shown a slideshow of 200 pictures that change as if someone clicks the TV channels. Their task is to stir up emotions. “Anyway, in ordinary people, non-Alexs, the amygdala literally shoots out,” says Joseph. “Honestly, I can't even look at some of the pictures,” she admits. Photographs include mutilated corpses, a feces-clogged toilet, a woman getting intimate waxing, and two invigorating climbing scenes.
“Maybe his amygdala is simply not working: there is no reaction to external stimuli,” Joseph frowns. “Perhaps he has such strong nerves and such strong self-regulation that no matter how crazy the amygdala goes, the frontal lobe extinguishes any emotions.”
There is also an existential question: why does he need all this? “He knows that his hobby is life-threatening. Yes, those around him remind him of this almost every day. Maybe it's about pleasure, a deep sense of pleasure from thrills?"
To find out, Honnold embarks on a second test. The "incentive test" is displayed on the screen. Honnold wins or loses a small amount (maximum $ 22) depending on how quickly he presses the button when the signal appears. “This assignment activates the reward mechanism, and for most of them it is pronounced,” says Joseph.
This time, the specialist examines another area of the brain - the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center located near the amygdala (which is also involved in the reward mechanism). It is one of the main processors of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates desire and creates a sense of satisfaction. Thrill seekers, Joseph explains, require more severe dopamine stimulation.
Half an hour later, Honnold gets out of the scanner. He looks tired, and his look is childishly sleepy. Raised in Sacramento, California, he has an overwhelmingly outspoken, albeit somewhat unaccustomed, demeanor - as if he is both focused and relaxed. His nickname is "Think about it." This is how he responds to most problems. He has the lean body of a professional climber with sculpted muscles more like a fitness enthusiast than a bodybuilder. The only exceptions are the fingers - they look like they were just pinched by the door, and the forearms - the sailor Popeye from the cartoon comes to mind.
"So I looked through all these photos - what is it, like stress?" - he wonders.
“Anyway, they usually cause a lot of arousal,” Joseph replies.
“I don’t know, of course, but it’s like nothing special,” he says. The photographs, even the most terrible ones, with burned children, seemed to him beaten and hackneyed. “As in the Cabinet of Curiosities,” he sums up.
A month later, after carefully examining Honnold's scans, Joseph organizes a group call to Shanghai. Honnold traveled to China to conquer the stalactite-strewn Great Arch in Getu National Park - this time with insurance. A rare case: Honnold's voice betrays fatigue and even a hint of stress. A few days earlier, he had taken an easy climb up a mountain near Index, Washington, to put up a railing for the parents of his girlfriend, Sunny McCandless. When she lowered him down, it turned out that the rope was not enough - too short. Honnold crashed from a height of three meters and landed on a pile of stones. “Well, we screwed up a little,” he reacted, escaping with a compression fracture of two vertebrae. It turned out that he earned the most serious injury in his entire climbing career, despite the insurance.
“What does all this mean?” Honnold asks as he stares at the bright MRI scans. "Is my brain okay?"
"In full," Joseph reassures, "and that's what's interesting …"
What caught her attention can be seen with the naked eye. For comparison, Joseph took another experimental subject - also an avid climber, and the same age. Like Honnold, he found the assignments boring. However, in those pictures where brain activity is marked in purple, his amygdala is lit with neon, while Honnold's is completely gray. Zero activity.
Moving on to the results of the "incentive" test. Once again, the amygdala and several other parts of the subject's brain "burn like a Christmas tree," Joseph reveals. Honnold, on the other hand, only lit up those parts of the brain where visual information is processed - a sign that he was awake and looking at the screen. The rest of the brain in the pictures is lifeless black and white.
"It looks like there is generally silence," assesses Honnold, "my head is not very busy."
To make sure she was not missing anything, Joseph tried to lower the statistical threshold. So she managed to discover that a single voxel was lit in the amygdala - the smallest particle of gray matter that the scanner "sees". But these data cannot be distinguished from the error. “With normal sensitivity, no activity in the amygdala is recognized,” she says.
Maybe that's why Honnold calmly climbs without insurance even where an ordinary person would have long ago taken a stupor? Very likely, Joseph muses. This is the explanation she sees. If there is no activity, then there is also no response to the alarm. Honnold really has the rarest brain. It seems that the feeling of fear is really unknown to him, and he is not afraid of anything. Not a bit at all.
Honnold himself never took talk of his own fearlessness seriously - although the whole world admires the truly supernatural calm with which he hangs at his fingertips on the edge of certain death. He made his first serious ascent without belay more than ten years ago, on the Ribbed Corner Mountain near Lake Tahoe in California - all alone. On the intricate scale of difficulty that climbers use, it was 5.7 points - 15 less than Honnold's then record. But still there is a plumb line with a height of 90 meters, no one canceled it. “If you break, you won't collect bones,” Honnold recalls.
To complete the route alone and without insurance, the main thing is to be willing. “I think it's not about some kind of superpowers, but about desire, I have more than enough of it,” he said. His idols were insurer rock climbers Peter Croft and John Bachar, who took free climbing to new heights in the 1980s and 1990s (besides, Honnold was very shy, which made it difficult for him to find companions). He looked at their photos in mountaineering magazines and felt - in his gut, probably - that he would like to be in their place and try his hand: so that everything was under control in the face of mortal danger.
In other words, he is a clinical case of a thrill seeker. On the same day that his brain MRI was done, Honnold took a psychological test for gambling. He was asked to rate how true the following statements were: “I love to rush down a snowy slope” (“Yes, I fucking love skiing”); “I always wanted to jump with a parachute” (“Otherwise! I even learned how to perform long jumps”); “I like to explore other people's cities or areas, even if there is a risk of getting lost” (“Yes, this is essentially my everyday life”). Once he filled out a similar questionnaire for an extreme sports show. So, the question "do you want to go rock climbing?" was illustrated with his own portrait.
Not a shadow of activity in the center of fear
However, then, at the Ribbed Corner, he was frightened in earnest. I had to frantically cling to each ledge. “I gripped so that my fingers fell off,” he recalls. Of course, he will not stop there. In his own words, Honnold grew "psychological armor" and over and over again learned to step over the threshold of fear. “For every really difficult piece, there was a hundred easier,” he says.
Little by little, even the most reckless tricks began to seem common to him: for example, when he holds on with his very fingertips, and his legs hang over a precipice. The last time he did this was in June, without preparation or insurance, climbing the infamous Full Fly Rock. In his twelve years of free climbing, Honnold has had occasion to release his grip, slip, stray from the route, be caught off guard by birds and ants, and just “freak out because he’d been in the air for too long.” But overcoming these difficulties, he learned to tame his fears.
Mary Monfils, head of the Fear Memory Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, says Honnold took the classic route of dealing with fear, even if he took it to the extreme. Until recently, she explains, most psychologists believed that memories of past events, even the most dire, remained unchanged. However, there has been a shift in science over the past 16 years. Studies have shown that, remembering an event, we seem to reconstruct it, recreating it anew. By changing certain details or their interpretation, we can erase the feeling of fear from our memory.
Honnold maintains a journal where he describes in detail his ascents and leaves notes on what can be improved. Before the most difficult climbs, he carefully prepares and rehearses techniques, honing every movement to perfection. Preparing for one 365-meter free solo climb, he imagined in colors that he could go wrong - right up to “fall, fall and bleed” - and resigned himself to these scenarios even at the foot. He climbed the Lunar Ledge in Zion National Park, Utah after 13 years of rock climbing and four years of solo climbing.
Digging into our memory, we each time see this or that event in a slightly different light, explains Monfils. The way Honnold refracts them is a great example of reprogramming.
Visualization, or visual imagination, works in a similar way, only here we picture future events to ourselves as having already happened. “By presenting everything step by step, he must have trained his motor memory and gained confidence in his abilities,” suggests Monfils. This confidence, in turn, reduces feelings of fear. This explains why people who are embarrassed to speak in public are more likely to overcome their fear the more often they have to speak in public. By the way, Honnold was also terribly afraid at first.
“It becomes easier if the feeling of fear can be overcome at least once, and then again and again,” explains Monfils. "Yes, it's a difficult path, but it gets easier every time."
Here again, the amygdala plays a key role. Monfils gives an example from his own experience. She has been afraid of snakes since childhood. One day he and his friends went canoeing. Seeing a poisonous water snake crawling along the coastal branch, Monfils with a wild cry grabbed the oar and did not calm down until she raked it into the middle of the lake. After that, she did not go on any hikes for a whole year. Then she made up her mind, but again met the snake - and started up again. But this time she decided to approach the case like a professional. Having calmed down, she tried to replay the episode from the standpoint of logic and common sense. So she reprogrammed her memory and was able to benefit from it. A week later, she overcame her fear, plucked up courage and went on a hike again.
“Before you remember: 'this is where I met a snake,' the amygdala lights up literally for a split second,” she explains. “Therefore, my hands sweat and emotions roll in. To turn on the prefrontal cortex and say:“no snake not here, and even the last time she did nothing to you, she just lay there peacefully, "- a separate, conscious effort is required. And the bark, as it were, extinguishes the flared amygdala. She puts everything in its place: there is nothing to fear, go boldly."
We cannot say for sure how much Honnold's fearlessness is innate and how much learned through training - for this we would need a time machine to go back in time and scan Honnold's brain while he was not yet fond of free climbing. But something can still be excluded.
Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux of New York University has been studying brain responses to threats since the 1980s. He says that in his entire career, he has never met a patient with a normal amygdala that would not react to anything at the same time - and with Honnold, it turns out that this is exactly what happens. It's also unlikely that the amygdala "burns out" from overstimulation, he says. From my stories, how Honnold's amygdala did not turn on during the entire test period, Ledoux is only amazed: "Wow."
According to Ledoux, there is genetic variation and different parts of the brain work differently in different people. Therefore, we can safely assume that Honnold's reactivity to threat is low - and that is why he, in his youth, saw only a powerful incentive in the photographs of his climber idols, and not a mortal danger. In addition to heredity, training is also important: over many thousands of hours, he programmed himself for high risk. “Probably, his brain is inherently predisposed to react to threats weaker than ordinary, untrained people. These qualities are only enhanced by his behavioral strategies,”explains Ledoux.
In the psyche, which predetermined Honnold's passion for free climbing, the role of genetics is easier to trace. Thrust cravings are thought to be hereditary and are partly passed down from parent to child. This trait is associated with a lowered anxiety threshold and a dull response to dangerous situations. One of the consequences of this - a tendency to underestimate risks - a recent study attributed to the low reactivity of the amygdala and the lack of suppression of gambling emotions by the prefrontal cortex.
Has Honnold's self-perception changed from the consciousness of his own unusualness?
Joseph does not track individual cases in his study (and even considers Honnold's scan a "single observation"), however, in her experience, "significantly weakened" amygdala reactivity is not uncommon among thrill-seekers. Honnold is a unique and pronounced case. The data compiled by her lab show that Honnold is twice as excited as the average person and 20% as exciting as the average thrill-seeker. She attributes the complete lack of reaction to the fact that her tests for Honnold were weak.
Honnold also scored a high score for accuracy, concentration, and whole vision. The tests recorded a cold-blooded calculation - his typical course of action - as well as an extremely low level of neuroticism. People like him are not inclined to puzzle over bad outcomes or imminent risks. “When you’re not afraid from the start, it’s easier to control yourself,” says Honnold.
“His psyche allows him to patiently maintain extreme concentration while fully charged for the thrill,” notes Joseph. A single example won't make a hypothesis, but a guy named "Just Think", who is not weak to roll solo excursions without insurance into the death zone, may well be considered convincing proof of Joseph's theory.
“The thrill-seeker, by definition, is highly charged with positive nerve stimulation, but at the same time never loses his composure and is always in control. It is very important. I think that in the future, understanding this will help us in the treatment of alcoholism, drug addiction and anxiety disorders, we will develop effective strategies, she says. "A new approach can be developed just by talking to Alex."
For example, a number of bad habits typical of thrill seekers are based on acute experiences without immediate consequences - for example, binge drinking or drug addiction. Honnold not only does not drink or does not use drugs, but does not even drink coffee. Joseph wonders if there is any way to redirect this energy to other highly aroused activities - like climbing, only with insurance - that also require self-restraint, careful planning, focus and focus on results, cultivating a different lifestyle.
Learning Honnold's magic won't hurt anyone. It is not at all necessary to have superpowers or to be able to completely suppress the amygdala, as if on command, but patience, work and constant encounters with fear will teach anyone to gain courage, which he did not even suspect.
Honnold's incentive is different, and the stakes are higher in his game. But no one canceled risk factors even for a person with his unique psyche - be it innate or developed by exercise.
When I asked him how he sees the ideal solo passage, he replies: “When you find yourself in situations that you enjoy. Real tin, you know? Generally awesome. This is the point - to get into a situation where you feel like a real hero."
He admits that the simpler daily outings are a bit boring, although most of them will seem extreme. The feeling of dissatisfaction remains even after hiking from the coveted list. “It turned out much weaker than I expected,” Honnolt said of three recent routes taken in one day. "You expect euphoria from new achievements, but instead of rising, you often feel disappointment."
The almost complete lack of response to the reward test fits the hypothesis that thrill seekers need more powerful stimuli. They trigger the dopamine release mechanism and make you feel happy, says Joseph. And one of the possible outcomes is the endless pursuit of strong sensations. In the case of drug addiction or gambling addiction, it leads to addiction and addiction.
In that sense, Honnold is addicted to climbing, Joseph explains, and his thirst for ever more thrills pushes him closer to his limits. At the same time, his forays are distinguished by careful preparation and conscientiousness. Thus, Honnold's greatest risk lies in the conflict between impulsive desires.
Joseph expected Honnold to perform poorly on the Impulsivity Scale in terms of disinhibition and rash decisions made without a second thought about the consequences, often in a foul mood. He, on the other hand, scored a high score. This partly explains why Honnold, in his own words, sometimes “screw it up” - and then concentration is replaced by depression and fear, and instead of carefully considered steps, impulsive decisions arise.
Here's an example. Once, in 2010, in his own words, "going crazy" from family quarrels, he climbed a 300-meter steep wall in Nevada, where he had climbed only once, and even then with insurance. Honnold believes that this incident taught him to tame both joy and bad mood for the sake of his goal. As you might guess, everything ended well - no one was hurt. I ask Joseph what she would advise Honnold about the scan and test results. “Don't let impulses prevail over discretion,” she replies.
The next time we contact Honnold, he and his girlfriend have already left for Europe to climb. I ask, has his self-perception somehow changed from the realization of his own unusualness? No, he says. The news that his amygdala was asleep like an old dog in an Irish pub did not affect his style in any way and did not add ambition. This does not mean, however, that he had nothing to think about.
While on holiday, he and McCandless decided to try their hand at the Via Ferrata near Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland. Via ferrata is a rocky area with artificial structures - steps, ladders, platforms, ledges and bridges driven into the stone. There is a safety rope for the safety of climbers. Honnold, of course, did not want to hear about insurance.
“But at some point I thought: damn it, but here, it turns out, is tough. I had to sort of get together,”he recalls. It turned out that a "via ferrata" made of iron fittings leads through the rock 900 meters up from the foot. Honnold and his girlfriend climbed high into the mountains, the weather deteriorated alarmingly, McCandless was about to burst, and besides, the water from the recent rains was flowing down the limestone slabs right in his face, and the rests for the hands and feet became slippery.
"I involuntarily had to think: how do I usually cope with fear?" Honnold admits. Then he realized that he wasn’t thinking about it at all - and this time was no exception. He has been in so many troubles that they have already become a routine. There was nothing to cope with: he was such a person. "There is nothing wrong here," he said to himself, "this is my job, period."
JB McKinnon is an author of articles and books on the environment, tourism, consumerism and other topics. His latest book is called "The World Gone and the Future: Nature, as it was, as it is, and as it will be."